


Wanderlust

by Kuroeia (Empatheia)



Category: Final Fantasy III
Genre: Gen, Male Friendship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-27
Updated: 2020-12-27
Packaged: 2021-03-10 18:48:17
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 759
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28351941
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Empatheia/pseuds/Kuroeia
Summary: Alus lives vicariously through Arc.
Relationships: Alus+Arc
Comments: 2
Kudos: 3





	Wanderlust

**Author's Note:**

> Just a little drabble I punched out while playing the game a few years ago, as I was interested in the characters the remake added and wished they got to interact more.

Alus liked to listen with his eyes closed.

He'd felt rude, at first, and apologized for the habit, but Arc had assured him that he understood and didn't mind. As a storyteller, he said, he took it as a compliment, if anything.

With his eyes closed, Alus could almost see what Arc was verbally painting for him. Almost. A swathe of uninterrupted blue sky, or the silent towers of coral through the gloom of the depths, or the odd vertigo of walking through ordinary blades of grass twice one's own height. Little things. Real things.

Saronia was vast, and he had yet to explore it all, but with each tale he elicited from Arc he felt something hungry growing within him. Saronia was vast, but no matter which corner of it one went to, it all still felt like Saronia. Exploration and discovery rarely felt new or surprising. It was his city, and he loved it and loved to deepen his knowing of it, but he understood better now how much more there was Out There, and couldn't undo the consequences of that.

"At that point we had no choice but to jump," Arc said. "There was no way down from the nest on foot, of course, and if we stayed it was clear we'd be dragonspawn dinner. It was a terrible drop, though, with nothing but stone and scrub to catch us. I'm still not quite sure how we survived, honestly. Perhaps Desch did something with power of his bloodline, I don't know. I just remember the blur of sandstone and choking on my own innards as they rose into my throat, and feeling this odd detached certainty that I was about to die and there wasn't a thing I could do about it now. I'd been afraid of things all my life, but I think that was when I realized how much worse fear could get than what I'd already known. I trembled for days afterward."

Alus opened his eyes, slowly, feeling his stomach twist as he imagined the all-too-short plummet toward a broken, awful demise. 

"I don't think I've ever been that kind of afraid," he said.

Frowning, Arc raised a finger. "Not even when your father...?"

Alus shook his head. "Oh, I was afraid, to be sure," he amended, "just not like that. I didn't feel helpless or detached at all. I was overwhelmingly present, drowning in everything I was feeling, desperate to take action and change what was happening somehow. I only realized that there was nothing I could do after it was already too late, and by then I wasn't afraid anymore, just... horrified, and grief-stricken."

"Well, I don't really recommend it," Arc said wryly. "I still have nightmares about it, among all the other things."

"I'm sure," said Alus, and they fell silent for a long moment.

Alus thought Arc probably lingered on the worst parts of his adventures so as to avoid glorifying it too much and giving Alus ideas. Alus wasn't sure how to tell him it was already too late for that.

He had been king for four years already. It felt like he'd been king forever, and he was only just coming of age. The remaining decades of his life -- barring the unexpected -- stretched out ahead of him like a grey grassland, featureless on the surface and full of things with teeth and stingers waiting for his hapless feet to stumble upon them. 

The face of his father rose indistinctly to mind, as it always did when he wavered in his determination to carry the mantle he had been given and to do right by it. Stern, unflinching, but a little soft around the corners of the eyes where smile lines betrayed his true nature. Though the image of his distorted grimace in the daggerlight tried to push its way in, he stubbornly refused to make room for it. He deliberately remembered his father as he had been before his downfall, to honour him. 

Just as he wore the crown to honour him, and wielded its power with a mind toward making him proud, wherever he was beyond the opaque veil of death. 

He had chosen this. Even so, sometimes his duty felt as vast and crushing as a mountain's flanks about his shoulders, not the weightless fabric of a royal stole.

"Tell me about the village of the gnomes again," he asked. "I so wish I could see it."

Arc ruefully obliged him, with every strange and wonderful detail he could remember. 

Alus closed his eyes.

X


End file.
